Later, using Irene’s motel room as a kind of headquarters, Thomas had worked the phone and eventually hired a film crew from Chicago. This morning they had met us at the site: Danny, Donny and Greg (along with two production assistants who went nameless), a trio whose midwestern wholesomeness so entirely subverted their piercings, brandings, ponytails, tattoos, scarifications, shaved heads and other countercultural accoutrements that they might as well have been called See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil.
“Char, could you walk through the field to where Donny’s standing?” Thomas asked. “Then just turn around and come back toward me.”
I stepped gingerly into the corn. It reached my waist, trembling around me like the surface of a green lagoon. The leaves were slippery and sharp, rolled around tiny ears of corn that weren’t visible yet.
Donny met me in the middle of the field, where the proposed bonfire site had been delineated with white string tied to thin splints of wood. Studs and earrings and small gemstones trembled on Donny’s face like a swarm of insects. It was not yet noon, but the throb of locusts was like a chant.
“Okay Char,” Thomas called from the road. “Come back toward me slowly. Careful not to damage the stalks.”
The rows of corn were about a yard apart, but the plants themselves were so bushy and dense that I had to walk carefully, pushing aside the leaves. A gamy heat rose from the reddish soil. At the mouth of the green tunnel I saw Thomas squinting into the camera, panning slowly over the field. See No Evil, the camera operator, hovered beside him wearing a battery belt. Eyeing this tableau, I had a sudden epiphany—I understood why Thomas had come to Rockford: for all his fund-raising abilities and management abilities and entrepreneurial genius, his dexterity as a salesman of ideas and gift for answering the collective prayers of the Zeitgeist, Thomas Keene wanted something else entirely from his life. He wanted to be a director.
By the time I emerged from the corn, Irene had reappeared beside him, her hair frizzy (the humidity) and drooping from a clip, sleepless fingerprints under her eyes. To say she had resisted Thomas’s midwestern sojourn would be to insult the heroic energy with which she had opposed it—on ideological grounds (“Why not let consumers use their imaginations? Why this need to give them a picture, when—”), on egotistical grounds (“Look, it’s obvious you don’t think my writing can stand on its own, and frankly I—”), on psychological grounds (“Don’t take this the wrong way, but your presence has a stymying effect on Charlotte, which means—”), on sympathetic grounds (“You have so much to do, Thomas. Why add this to the—?”), on marital grounds (“I’m extremely eager to get home. No, nothing’s wrong, I’m just dying to get—”). When none of it worked, when Thomas decided to come nonetheless (a fact that I believed had never been in doubt), Irene collapsed onto her Sweden House bed and did not rise for nearly twenty-four hours, during which she consumed nothing but Fresca. But by the following day, when Thomas arrived, she had managed to pull herself together, and welcomed him with a good-natured resignation whose primary ingredient was relief—the relief of giving up, of throwing your arms around the very thing you’ve done everything in your power to avoid. The relief of no longer having to fight.
But I wanted Irene to fight. A ghostliness had overtaken her since Thomas’s arrival, so at times she seemed to meld with our surroundings to the point of translucence. Even her anguished shadow self appeared muted, faint. Or perhaps I was losing the power to see it.
“Good, okay. Looks good,” Thomas said. “Danny, we can start to cut. Let’s run the saw off your generator, if the cord’s long enough. Irene’s ordered sand, that should be here around one.” He checked his watch, then leaned over Irene’s shoulder with a familiarity that made me bridle. Together they studied her notebook. “What else?” Thomas asked.
“Well, there’s the ditch,” Irene reminded him.
“Oh, man. Who the hell is going to dig that ditch?”
Irene lowered her voice. “We could ask Danny if the PAs might be willing to do it.”
“I feel weird asking them,” Thomas said. “We’re talking hours of heavy physical work. We need, like, laborers.”
“Ditch diggers,” I interjected with a smirk.
“Is there such a thing as a temp agency for manual labor?” Thomas asked Irene. “Would they have something like that around here?”
“I’ll work on it,” she said, betraying no exasperation, if she felt it. But I was exasperated—for her—having made it my dubious bailiwick to sustain the reactions I was certain Irene would have had, were she not presently a ghost. She teaches at New York University, okay? I mentally upbraided Thomas. She doesn’t have time to be your secretary. But apparently Irene did have time.
“Then makeup,” she said, consulting her list again. “Your nieces are all set for that, right?”
“Grace is bringing them over after lunch,” I said.
“And what about kindling?” she asked. “Bonfire stuff.”
“Oh, the farmer’s kids are going to handle that,” Thomas said. “Which reminds me.” He paused, looking uncomfortable, then resumed somewhat plaintively, “Irene, is there some way you could possibly write the farmer into the script? Throw him a line or two? He’s been amazingly helpful with this whole thing, and I kind of—I guess I implied there might be a part for him.”
To my stupefaction, Irene said mildly, “Sure, I’ll write him in.”
“Whoawhoa,” I said, wheeling around to look at her. “Explain how a farmer fits into my accident?”
“He can call the ambulance.”
“Perfect,” Thomas said. “That’s nice. And it doesn’t take anything away from the authenticity.”
“Except that it didn’t happen,” I pointed out.
“Well, it could have,” Irene said. “You don’t know who called the ambulance.”
“I know it wasn’t that farmer!” I said, but I didn’t want to argue with Irene. I wanted to understand Irene. I wanted to become her—to hold her place, guard the coordinates of her personality until she could resume it.
“It’s noon,” she said. “Should I drive into town and buy lunch?”
To hell with this, I thought, and walked away.
Back in the Grand Am, I cranked the air-conditioning to high. I didn’t care about wearing down the battery; what difference could it make? A dead battery wasn’t going to halt this project—nothing had that power, not Irene, not Thomas; certainly not me. It was bigger than all of us. As I searched for my place among the printed pages, the whine of an electric saw rose from the cornfield and the sound of locusts seemed to sharpen in response—a fierce, rhythmic chatter, like a legion of monkeys.
49
Once before, I had made the drive between New York and Rockford. Thirteen years ago. In my stalling green Fiat. Coming to Manhattan for the first time.
Now I was going home. In a car I loved too much to let anyone drive it.
Eventually the sun rose. We were in Pennsylvania. A slouching, cruddy landscape. Old factory buildings, broken windowpanes. They looked like abandoned redoubts (I made a “?” next to that word.) from a forgotten war.
Z was transfixed. He liked it. These ruins of America.
I was driving. And waiting, my body alert. Waiting for him to explain who he was, what larger structure he was part of. What we were doing. And most of all, why he had chosen me. What qualities he had recognized as being unique, or uniquely suited to his purposes.
Moose stood at his cubbyhole in the history department office, clutching his mail while summer’s skeleton crew of receptionists (namely, one) watched him with her demonic personality fully hoisted. He glanced in the direction of his colleagues’ doors in search of someone to talk to, someone with whom to exchange a few moments of capricious banter, because even an interaction so awkward and fraught (for Moose) seemed preferable just now to descending to his basement office.
Of course, most of his colleagues were incising Lake Michigan with powerboats or driving their
children through the Grand Canyon or laying bricks around flower beds.… But there, an open door! A fellow summer straggler! Jim Rasmussen, reading at his desk and gently massaging his scalp. Moose lunged toward his colleague indiscriminately, singing “HEL-lo, Jim” from the doorway just one or two seconds ahead of the recollection that Rasmussen was his flagrant enemy—that he’d tried more than once to get Moose fired and referred to him as a “Looney Tune” in a recent faculty meeting. Rasmussen wheeled around with a frightened look. A mistake, a mistake. Moose saw the confusion in his colleague’s eyes.
“Moose,” Rasmussen muttered, suspicious of this uncharacteristic and unnecessary—indeed, interruptive—salutation. A mistake! But now, having clanged hello, Moose felt compelled to follow up with something more. Speak, he commanded himself as a purple heat filled his face. Talk about the weather or a sport or some departmental matter (what did people talk about?). “So, ah,” he finally said, “you reading anything good, there?”
Rasmussen squinted at him, awaiting the catch. Several agonizing moments passed, and finally he held up a book. An eighteenth-century man was Jim Rasmussen, and Moose braced himself for a monograph detailing the succession of Spanish kings, or a biography of Robespierre, a history of mining in England—prepared himself to respond with some query about the evolution of sight, about glass and its uses, but what Rasmussen brandished aloft was something Moose had trouble deciphering at first: an unauthorized biography of Jennifer Lopez.
“Uh,” said Moose, uncertain who she was, but mortified for Rasmussen purely on the basis of her picture.
“I’m crazy about her,” Rasmussen said defiantly, slapping the embarrassment right back at Moose, refusing to accept it. He wouldn’t pay—Moose would pay. “Just crazy about her.”
“Huh,” Moose said weakly.
“Can’t get enough.”
“I’ll, ah, let you get on with it, then.”
“Nice to see you, Moose,” Rasmussen said, baring teeth, and Moose sprang away from the door and fled the debacle, unsure how extensive a debacle it really was, fighting a sense that with this bungled effort at fraternity, he had at last clinched his academic ruin.
Silence fell in around him like clods of earth as he descended the steps to his office. Turning the key, Moose smiled, demonstrating to someone (who?) that all was well, that everything was under control, that really it was a good thing the campus was so empty because he had an awful lot of work to do, and for that reason it was probably all for the best that—
But he wasn’t going to think about Charlotte. Moose had made that promise to himself a week ago, when it happened, and since then had managed (mostly) to banish his niece from his mind. He hadn’t even told his wife—hadn’t mentioned Charlotte’s name even once—though Priscilla had asked him repeatedly what was wrong.
Hands trembling from the Rasmussen imbroglio, Moose collapsed into his chair and set down his mail, a slender quantity bereft of the creamy professional envelopes he craved. He sorted through it nevertheless, purely for something to do on this desultory day. And then he stopped. A change had occurred in the atmosphere around him, a change as simple yet dramatic as a cloud occluding bright sunlight, with the crucial distinction that there had been no sun (metaphorically speaking) in Moose’s life for several days. No, he was too little in the sun for that metaphor to serve (not that any did), so Moose excluded sunlight from his figuration of the shift of mood in his office, a shift like those icy currents he’d encountered on occasion while swimming in warm water: a tentacle of cold that brought with it an intimation of the ocean’s vastness, its depths, its darkness, the unfathomable creatures abiding in its nether reaches.
Moose rose from his chair, went to the window and lifted the shade. In nosed a few streaks of sunlight. He gazed at the path, half hoping that someone would walk along it and lift his faltering spirits—but who would come? Who but more Rasmussens, an infinitude of Rasmussens bent on thwarting him?
But he wasn’t going to think this way! Moose went to his file cabinet, opened it with his key and looked down at the musty mass of his manuscript—the history of Rockford, Illinois, which so often had the power to cheer him. He lifted a sheaf of pages and held them in his hands, straining to mobilize the worn and rusty machinery of his optimism. Perhaps the problem was that he didn’t get out enough. He should do as his father had done, drive into Chicago once a month or take the train (except there was no more train), have a swim and lunch at the University Club among polished wood and expensive tailoring, raspberries for dessert, served over ice and topped with a clump of whipped cream. Chicago.
Chicago!
The consolidation of these signals and notions into a plan was a physically galvanizing event; Moose replaced his manuscript with great care, locked the drawer, then strode from his office without pause, kicking shut the door, ascended the stairs and left Meeker Hall without so much as a glance in the direction of Rasmussen’s office. Then he huffed his way from the deserted college campus along serpentine paths drenched in the surreal rhythms of locusts.
One-half mile later, awash in sweat, he found his station wagon parked in its designated spot outside his apartment at Versailles. For perhaps fifteen seconds, he contemplated going indoors and leaving a note for Priscilla, who was at the hospital, explaining his unscheduled departure for Chicago. But no. That would impede his present momentum, and momentum was so hard to sustain. Go, he thought. Go! He had his wallet and his Visa card—hit the road, Jack! The very idea of departure made him giddy, and Moose struggled to calm himself, to anchor his mood like someone trying to peg down an unruly tent in a very strong wind (how he loathed metaphors, their coupling of unlike things into grotesques, like minotaurs), but the tent was too big, the wind too strong—his good mood continued to billow and flap untethered as he pulled out of Versailles with a whoop, punching the radio dial until he found an oldies station, music from the seventies, hey this was great; Moose sang along with “Hotel California” as he careened down East State in his low-slung station wagon, finessing his way around Lincoln Town Cars driven by white-haired ladies whose faces were only inches from the windshield. Eventually he circled onto the interstate. Ah, what happiness came of sheer motion, just letting it rip. No wonder the highway was an American icon for freedom! To hell with pills, Moose thought. Motion therapy—why not? Mutatio loci! And it wasn’t just that a voyage such as this reminded him of the blind, easy days before his transformations—it was simply that moving felt good.
The phrase broke across Moose profoundly, moving feels good, a phrase that was not only inarguably true (proof being his present fizzing state of near hilarity), but (better yet) whose truth was blessedly independent of the minotaur of metaphor. Moose scrabbled in the glove compartment for a notebook in which to write—someone was honking, oh, shit, he’d swerved out of his lane—he tooted his horn and grinned, he was so happy! Splayed the notebook between his thighs and wrote, or hoped he was writing, Moving feels good, la-dee-dah, heart racing, skipping beats. Motion—curative? he scrawled, then was distracted by signs for O’Hare airport to his right, signs that reminded him of his plan, as yet unrealized—undivulged—unresearched—to take Priscilla to Hawaii. Would he ever do it? Could he? These questions affronted Moose like a flock of blackbirds flapping so near to his face that he wanted physically to bat them away (and they were only metaphors!). And now here came the ominous sensation once again, an icy premonition of doom. Moose fought it back—I am a fighter, he thought. Surely the problem was that he was out of practice, not having traveled anywhere in so long. A trip to Chicago would be the best way to start—get his feet wet, as it were, go to the lake with its chalky limestone rim, go to the places his father had taken him as a child—yes, a melting sensation of relief notified Moose that this was indeed the right choice, the best choice, and, best of all, the choice he had already made. He was halfway there! And if that venture proved successful—he was accelerating again, fleeing the contortions of O’Hare airport for the refuge
of motion itself—if all went well in Chicago, then perhaps he would be ready to attempt Hawaii.
By one-thirty, a twelve-by-twelve-foot square of corn had been mowed, cleared, tamped, doused in water and buried under a layer of bright orange sand—a tiny patch of Technicolor beach secreted among verdant farmland. The farmer’s two sons began dragging load after bristling load of sticks and twigs and kindling wood with their heavy work gloves, piling it onto the sand into a thorny tower that reached higher than the surrounding corn.
Somehow, Irene had managed to find two men to dig the ditch. They arrived in a pickup truck, one tall (Mike), one short (Ed), their sad, floppy faces like diagrams of the damage wrought upon human skin by prolonged exposure to sunlight. As they climbed from their truck, shovels in hand, Thomas sidled over to Irene, who was standing beside me. “They look a little,” he said, and moved one hand ambiguously.
She nodded, watching the men. “I’m surprised,” she said. “The one I talked to sounded.”
“The heat. We don’t want.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Voices,” he agreed.
“Is this an actual conversation?” I asked. “Do you really understand each other?”
They both looked startled. “We’re just saying the men are older than we expected,” Irene said, coloring slightly.
But Mike and Ed were ready for work, needed work—for the money, of course, but also because this job had emancipated them from an afternoon of the computer courses they’d been forced to take since the banks got their farms: how to create a file, write a letter, make a chart. They took the classes to please their frightened, crabby wives, who somehow expected them, at fifty-eight and sixty-one, to reinvent themselves as middle managers. All this I gleaned from listening to them talk while I waited for Irene to return with the Grand Am (she was buying lunch), so I could crawl back inside it. Thomas stood near me, eyeing the ditch diggers, wincing at the whistling noises their lungs made (smokers both, packets outlined in their breast pockets), the way their sclerotic bellies strained the belts of their work pants.